‘What’s it all about?’
‘This man in Tessera who was murdered.’
‘The newspapers told me that much, Guido.’
Brunetti picked up his coffee. ‘You know,’ he said after the first sip. ‘Maybe I would like a grappa. There any of that Gaja left? The Barolo?’
‘Yes,’ she said, settling herself more comfortably on the sofa. ‘Get me a glass, too, would you?’
He was quickly back, with the bottle and two glasses, and as they drank it, Brunetti repeated most of what Guarino had told him, ending up with the reason for the arrival of the photo in her email the next day. He also tried to explain his own contradictory feelings about having been drawn into Guarino’s investigation. It was none of his business: the investigation belonged to the Carabinieri. Perhaps he was flattered by being asked to help, his vanity no different from Patta’s at being considered ‘the man in charge’. Or perhaps it was the desire to show that he could do something the Carabinieri could not.
‘A photo’s not going to make it any easier for Signorina Elettra to find him,’ Brunetti admitted. ‘But I wanted to make Guarino do something, even if it was only to make him admit that he’d been lying to me.’
‘Well, withholding information, at any rate,’ Paola corrected him.
‘All right, if you insist,’ Brunetti admitted with a smile.
‘And he wants you to help him learn if anyone who lives near San Marcuola is capable of. . of what?’
‘I suppose he’s interested in violent crime. After all, it’s likely Guarino thinks the man in the photo is the killer. Or at any rate is mixed up in it.’
‘Do you?’
‘I don’t know enough about it to think anything. All I know is that this man had Ranzato do some illegal shipping for him and that he dresses well and arranged to meet someone at the San Marcuola stop.’
‘I thought you said that’s where he lives.’
‘Well, not exactly.’
Paola closed her eyes with a great display of much-put-upon patience and said, ‘I never know whether that means yes or no.’
Brunetti smiled. ‘In this case, it means I assumed so.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he said he’d meet someone there one evening, and that’s what we do when people come to town: we meet them at the imbarcadero near where we live.’
‘Yes,’ Paola said, and then added, ‘Professor.’
‘Don’t fool around, Paola. It’s obvious.’
She leaned aside and took the point of his chin between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. Gently, she turned his head to face her. ‘It’s also obvious that the judgement that someone is well-dressed can mean different things.’
‘What?’ Brunetti asked, his hand arrested on its way to the bottle of grappa. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides, he also said the way the man dressed was flashy, whatever that means.’
Paola studied his face as she would study that of a stranger. ‘What we consider “flashy”, even “well dressed”, depends on how we dress ourselves, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I still don’t understand,’ Brunetti said, picking up the bottle.
Paola waved away his offer of more grappa and said, ‘Do you remember that case — must be ten years ago — when you had to go out to Favaro every night for a week to question a witness?’
He thought for a while, remembered the case, the endless lies, the final failure. ‘Yes.’
‘Remember how the Carabinieri would bring you back and drop you at Piazzale Roma, and you’d take the Number One home?’
‘Yes,’ he answered, wondering where she was going with this. Would she suggest that this case, too, had the same feeling of failure about it, something he was beginning to feel himself?
‘And do you remember the people you told me you saw on the vaporetto every night? Those shifty-looking types, with the cheap blondes? The men with the leather jackets and the women with the leather mini-skirts?’
‘Oh, my God,’ Brunetti said, giving himself a slap on the forehead so strong it literally knocked him back into the sofa beside her. ‘Those who have eyes and see not,’ he said.
‘Please, Guido, don’t you start quoting the Bible.’
‘Sorry. The shock must have been too much for me,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘You’re a genius. But I’ve known that for years. Of course, of course. The Casinò. They’d meet at San Marcuola and go together, wouldn’t they? Of course. Genius, genius.’
Paola held up a hand in a patently false protestation of modesty. ‘Guido: it’s only a possibility.’
‘Yes, it’s only a possibility,’ Brunetti agreed. ‘But it makes sense and at least it lets me do something.’
‘Do something?’ Paola inquired.
‘Yes.’
‘As in letting us go to the Casinò?’ she asked.
‘Us?’
‘Us.’
‘Why us?’
She held up her glass to him, and he poured her another measure of grappa. She sipped it, nodded in appreciation as strong as his own had been, and then said, ‘Because nothing is more likely to call attention to itself than a single man at the Casinò.’
Brunetti started to protest, but she cut off his opposition by holding up her glass between them. ‘He can’t just walk around, staring at the people at the tables and never gambling, can he? What better way to make himself visible? And if he does start to play, what’s he going to do, spend the night losing our apartment?’ When she saw that his expression had begun to lighten, she asked, ‘After all, Signorina Elettra can’t be expected to put that on the office equipment bill, can she?’
‘I suppose not,’ Brunetti admitted, as clear an admission of surrender as a man had ever given.
‘I’m serious, Guido,’ she said, setting her glass on the table. ‘You need to look comfortable while you’re there, and if you go alone, you’re going to look like a policeman on the prowl, well, a man on the prowl, at any rate. If you go with me, we can at least talk and laugh and look like we’re having a good time.’
‘Does that mean we aren’t going to have a good time?’
‘Can you imagine having a good time watching people lose money gambling?’
‘They don’t all lose,’ he said.
‘And not everyone who jumps off a roof breaks a leg,’ she shot back.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that the Casinò makes money, and it makes money because people lose it. Gambling. Maybe they don’t lose every night, but they always lose in the end.’
Brunetti toyed with the idea of taking another small glass of grappa but put the idea behind him manfully and said, ‘All right. But can we still have a good time?’
‘Not until tomorrow night,’ she answered.
Brunetti had decided to trust to luck that someone at the Casinò would recognize or recall the young man in the photo Paola brought home from the university, though Fortuna was perhaps the wrong deity to invoke in these circumstances, she no doubt having to endure other, and more urgent, solicitations. He was also aware that, even if he did discover the young man’s identity, or even the man himself, the only thing he could do, after perhaps checking to see if the man had a criminal record, was to pass the information on to Guarino. Even with the Right returned to power in the government, it was still not a crime to have your photo taken.
However much Brunetti reminded himself that he was a private citizen, come to the Casinò in the company of his lady wife, he knew that as the person who had, in recent years, been in charge of two of the police investigations of the Casinò, he was unlikely to pass unremarked.
When they arrived, the man at reception recognized him immediately, but apparently the administration harboured no hard feelings towards him, and he was given VIP entrance, though he refused the complimentary fiche that were offered with it. He purchased fifty Euros in chips and gave half to Paola.